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Background Michigan's Middle Eastern‐North African (MENA) community is an essential and growing part of the state's population. However, MENA individuals are underrepresented in the research literature due to a lack of recognized demographic categorization. Prior work shows that MENA women face barriers to traditional clinician‐directed cervical cancer screening. This study aims to capture the perspectives of MENA women about home‐based urine cervical cancer screening using HPV kits and to assess whether such methods could positively impact future screening intent. Methods Through collaboration with a community partner in southeast Michigan, we recruited MENA women ages 30–65, with 44 completing the study. Participants used urine HPV self‐sampling kits at home and then shared their perspectives through a phone interview. We used an inductive, thematic approach to analyze the interviews, which captured experiences with home‐based self‐sampling, screening preferences, and impact on future screening intent. Results Participants found that urine home‐based self‐sampling was acceptable as a convenient and comfortable way to screen for cervical cancer. Most (80%) preferred self‐sampling over traditional clinician‐directed screening and preferred collecting urine samples at home (73%) rather than in the clinic. Overall, 80% reported that access to urine self‐sampling would positively impact their future screening intent. Conclusions MENA participants in this study positively received home‐based cervical cancer screening using urine HPV self‐sampling kits. These findings support the clinical implementation of self‐sampling and home‐based cervical cancer screening to increase participation, particularly among those in under‐screened communities.

This paper investigates the meanings medical students invest in their white coats and how these meanings shape students’ strategic use of the white coat as a status symbol. During a four-year ethnography of medical education, I found that the white coat signified knowledgeability and was used to assert status. In interactions students policed their own and each other’s status displays, a process I identify as an instance of status management in medical training. An analysis of the meanings and conventional uses of the short white coat increases our understanding of how novice trainees negotiate their place in a new social order.

The anatomy lab has been studied by sociologists interested in professional socialization since the 1950s. This is because the act of dissecting a cadaver is thought to be foundational for both the student’s medical knowledge and the development of the student’s professional identity. In this paper, I revisit the anatomy lab both historically and ethnographically. Drawing on theoretical insights from the laboratory ethnography tradition within science and technology studies, I show that students use material artifacts in the lab to support their “surgical identity play.” This activity is structured by the laboratory’s performative architecture even while it is unsupervised by anatomy faculty. While many analyses of professional socialization focus on how students learn to interact with patients during their training, I show that the anatomy lab experience is an important form of professional socialization because here students learn to employ surgical instruments, language, and dress, and begin to relate to each other as colleagues.

From 1940 to 1980, studies of medical education were foundational to sociology, but attention shifted away from medical training in the late 1980s. Recently, there has been a marked return to this once pivotal topic, reflecting new questions and stakes. This article traces this resurgence by reviewing recent substantive research trends and setting the agenda for future research. We summarize four current research foci that reflect and critically map onto earlier projects in this subfield while driving theoretical development elsewhere in the larger discipline: (1) professional socialization, (2) knowledge regimes, (3) stratification within the profession, and (4) sociology of the field of medical education. We then offer six potential future directions where more research is needed: (1) inequalities in medical education, (2) socialization across the life course and new institutional forms of gatekeeping, (3) provider well-being, (4) globalization, (5) medical education as knowledge-based work, and (6) effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper explores how professional engineers recognize and make sense of product defects in their everyday work. Such activities form a crucial, if often overlooked, part of professional engineering practice. By detecting, recognizing and repairing defects, engineers contribute to the creation of value and the optimization of production processes. Focusing on early-career engineers in an advanced steel mill in the United States, we demonstrate how learning specific ways of seeing and attending to defects take shape around the increasing automation of certain aspects of engineering work. Practices of sensing defects are embodied, necessitating disciplined eyes, ears, and hands, but they are also distributed across human and non-human actors. We argue that such an approach to technical work provides texture to the stark opposition between human and machine work that has emerged in debates around automation. Our approach to sensing defects suggests that such an opposition, with its focus on job loss or retention, misses the more nuanced ways in which humans and machines are conjoined in perceptual tasks. The effects of automation should be understood through such shifting configurations and the ways that they variously incorporate the perceptual practices of humans and machines.

The Unites States healthcare system is a patchwork, and patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers must craft individual solutions to cope with gaps in the system. Sociological thinking is crucial for forming healthcare systems that provide high-quality care, control cost, and increase access without inheriting the flaws of existing systems. Recent work to develop a “social science of solutions” provides both motivation and a roadmap for progress-oriented work toward redressing social problems and building real utopias. Collaborative Learning Health Systems may be a model for real utopias in healthcare, but they must balance their potential with risks as they grow.

Building Learning Health Systems requires the combination of information, regulatory, and cultural infrastructures that create communities focused on changing health outcomes through the application of quality improvement methodology, focused data collection, closed feedback loops, and community‐participatory techniques. Accomplishing the vision of the Learning Health System relies on building robust infrastructures, and teaching a wide variety of stakeholders to participate in these novel socio‐technical systems. In this commentary, I draw on empirical examples from fieldwork with Learning Networks to describe how social scientists view culture and what this concept might hold for learning health sciences.

Research on crisis management focuses on pre-planning for disasters in order to understand potential barriers. However, one significant barrier to crisis response is that organizations may come together in unplanned configurations during crisis response. This means that significant opportunities exist for understanding the process by which individuals learn, collaborate, and create new systems during crises. In this case report, we present the case of face shield production by a university, academic medical center, and community partners during the supply chain collapse of the early COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of identifying the relationships that formed during the COVID-19 response, so that this case of relationship formation and participant experiences might inform similar disaster response challenges in the future. Thirteen participants responded to an in-depth questionnaire designed to simulate an asynchronous in-depth interview. Respondents reported on the activities of 80 individuals from 38 units/organizations, providing insight into communication challenges and resolutions. Responses were analyzed using thematic analysis, highlighting roles and relationships among participants. The findings grant insight into the experience of learning from crisis response efforts, responding to recent calls for social scientific work on COVID-19 responses.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic impacted many aspects of normal operations in academic medicine. While effective leadership is always important, the intensity and urgency of COVID-19 challenged academic medicine leaders to find new ways to lead their institutions and manage their own experiences of the pandemic.MethodsSixteen physician leaders from Michigan Medicine took part in semistructured interviews during April and May 2020. Participants were asked open-ended questions about the attributes and techniques that were important to effectively lead during a crisis. The authors analysed the interviews using thematic analysis.ResultsParticipants described three overarching themes of leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) bringing together a diverse team with clear, shared goals; (2) using a range of strategies to tend to their teams’—as well as their own—well-being; and (3) engaging in leadership reasoning as a way of learning from others and reflecting on their own actions to inform their future leadership practice.ConclusionThe results of this study reveal several salient themes of crisis leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also highlight the role of leadership reasoning, a reflective practice employed by leaders to understand and improve their leadership skills. This finding presents leadership skill development as part of lifelong learning in medicine. Findings may be incorporated into best practices and preparations to inform future healthcare leaders.

Introduction The rapid response to COVID‐19 has necessitated infrastructural development and reorientation in order to safely meet patient care needs. Methods A qualitative case study was constructed within a larger ethnographic field study. Document collection and fieldnotes and recordings from nonparticipant observation of network activities were compiled and chronologically ordered to chart the network's response to changes in epilepsy care resulting from COVID‐19 and the rapid transition to telemedicine. Results The network's response to COVID‐19 was characterized by a predisposition to action, the role of sharing as both a group practice and shared value, and the identification of improvement science as the primary contribution of the group within the larger epilepsy community's response to COVID‐19. The findings are interpreted as an example of how group culture can shape action via a transparent and mundane shared infrastructure. Conclusions The case of one multi‐stakeholder epilepsy Learning Network provides an example of the use of infrastructure that is shaped by the group's culture. These findings contribute to the development of a social theory of infrastructure within Learning Health Systems.